Alfred “Orr” Kelly

22 November 1923 - 17 March 2021

Alfred Orr Kelly, 97, a newspaper, magazine reporter and author of 13 books, died on March 17, 2021 of old age.

Kelly, who went by his middle name, Orr, was a reporter for the San Luis Obispo Telegram Tribune, Pismo Times, Salinas Californian, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Star and U.S. News & World Report. With his wife, Mary (predeceased), he established the weekly Berkeleybased Berkeley Review newspaper.

Born in San Luis Obispo, California on November 22, 1923, Kelly started his career as a journalist at age 12, with the home-produced San Luis Obispo Weekly News, where he was the editor. The mimeographed paper covered local news and didn’t publish many issues, but did gain the attention of the competing San Luis Obispo Telegram Tribune, for which Kelly later worked.

While waiting to be called up during World War II, Kelly worked for the San Luis Telegram Tribune, Pismo Times, and Salinas Californian. It was while Kelly was reporting on a car accident for the Californian that he met Mary Davis, whom he would marry in 1949.

During the war, Kelly trained as a navigator for B-17 and B-29 bombers. It was the beginning of a lifelong fascination with the American military, and the soldiers who serve in it.

Following World War II, Kelly returned to Santa Clara University, where he edited The Owl, the university’s literary magazine, and was president of the Young Writer’s Club. After earning a master’s degree at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Kelly joined the San Francisco Chronicle in 1949 as a copy boy.

As Kelly later remarked, it was still the day when reporters learned the profession from the ground up, whether you had a masters or had only finished high school. He did feel lucky compared to other copy boys who left the paper to fight in World War II and came back to the same job. By 1959, Kelly had become assistant city editor for the Chronicle after covering the police beat and working as a general assignment reporter. He covered stories as varied as labor strikes on the San Francisco docks, forest fires, the 1953 Bakersfield earthquake, and jumpers off the Golden Gate bridge.

Harking back to his boyhood days editing the San Luis Obispo Weekly News, in 1959 Kelly launched the weekly Berkley Review. Like with many small papers, the Berkley Review was a family business, with Mary handling administrative tasks and their children, Charles and Barbara, selling subscriptions and doing other odd jobs. Although the Berkley Review reached a respectable circulation, advertising income was insufficient to cover costs and the newspaper ceased publication in 1962.

Kelly then moved to the Washington Star, eventually becoming an assistant city editor before going back to being a reporter. At the Star, Kelly covered the Vietnam War as a Pentagon correspondent and the Watergate scandal as a Justice Department reporter. He also covered the U.S. space program, including the Apollo 10 mission, which sent a crew to circle the moon, and the Apollo 11 mission in which men first landed on the moon. During his time at the Star, Kelly, a long-time member of the American Newspaper Guild, served as chairman of the unit and vice president of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild.

In 1976 Kelly left daily journalism and moved to U.S. News & World Report. While at U.S. News, Kelly covered much of official Washington, including the Pentagon, the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, and the National Security Agency.

While at U.S. News, Kelly was one of the founders of the Defense Writers Group, which held informal, off-the-record, breakfast meetings between reporters and defense and security officials. The Defense Writers Group continues to this day as a program at George Washington University, often with well-publicized, on-therecord, meetings. Although he served as an assistant editor at the Chronicle and Star, Kelly was always a reporter at heart, thriving on the excitement and tension of deadline journalism. He told friends his greatest fear was that he would someday have to grow up and get a real job. He was known among his colleagues as a “meat and potatoes” reporter, capable of covering anything from a murder or four-alarm fire to an interview with a cabinet officer or a congressional hearing – invariably on deadline.

Kelly was not bashful about his reporting skills, either. In a 1962 resume, he wrote, “References, in addition to those specified below, include anyone for whom he has worked (any executive of the San Francisco Chronicle), anyone with whom he has been in competition (the city editors of the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco News-Call Bulletin and the publisher of the Berkeley Daily Gazette) and anyone with whom he has come in contact as a reporter (any official of the City of Berkeley or the Berkeley Unified School District).”

In 1986, Kelly took early retirement from U.S. News and immediately shifted to work as a book author. His first effort, King of the Killing Zone, told the story of the development of the Army’s Abrams M-1 main battle tank. The book provided an insider’s look at research, testing and eventual production of a major weapons system.

Kelly followed this with an account of the development of a Navy attack fighter plane (Hornet: Development

of the Navy’s F/A-18 fighter-bomber); two books on the U.S. Navy SEALS (Brave Men, Dark Waters: The untold story of the Navy SEALS and Never Fight Fair: Inside the legendary Navy SEALS); a book on U.S. Air Force special forces (From A Dark Sky: The untold story of Air Force Special Operations); a history of the American Army’s first encounter with German troops in North Africa in 1942 (Meeting The Fox: The Allied invasion of North Africa from Operation Torch to Kasserine Pass to victory in Tunisia); and two books of fiction about the adventures of a special SEALS-Air Force team (SEALS Eagle Force: Desert Thunder and SEALS Eagle Force: Eagle Strike).

With his wife Mary, he co-authored Dream’s End. During her research as a genealogist, Mary Kelly had come across two Iowa farm boys who were Orr Kelly’s mother’s uncles. Dream’s End tells how the two boys enlisted in the army during the Civil War, one in the infantry, the other in the cavalry. One boy died in a futile battle in Arkansas. The other died shortly after the war of illness contracted at the notorious Confederate Andersonville prison.

Following Mary’s death, Kelly wrote the book Where do we go from here? A Christian Confronts the Mysteries of Death and Life After Death. He followed with Bad Generals and The Havoc They Cause, and then Sudden Victory about the World War I tank battle in Amiens, which he called “the first battle of the second World War”.

He published his last book, The Big Wink, a crime novel based in San Francisco in the 1950s, in February 2021 at the age of 97. The book draws in part from Kelly’s experiences as a reporter in San Francisco during that time. He was working on a sequel at the time of his death.

As a reporter and writer, Kelly always tried to share the experiences of the people he was writing about. He flew in mock dogfights with the Air Force, streaked across the Nevada desert in a Navy FA-18 airplane at 200 feet and 600 miles an hour, and went swimming, and shooting, with the Navy SEALS.

On other occasions, he landed on (and was catapulted from) aircraft carriers, flew in gunships on wartime missions and descended into the buried launch control room for an intercontinental ballistic missile. At 67, he successfully completed the U.S. Navy’s water survival course, including exiting an upside-down helicopter under water while wearing blackout goggles. To research his books, he visited Civil War battles sites in U.S., World War II battle sites in Tunisia and World War I battle sites in France. As one of the people he interviewed said, “I know why you are writing this book …. so you can do all these neat things”.

In his off-duty hours, Kelly spent as much time as possible at the farm he and his wife bought in Washington County, Maryland, in 1972. He was an avid trumpet player of, admittedly, limited talent. Going into his 90s, he took up the banjo and learned to play from lessons delivered over the internet.

Travel was an integral part of Kelly’s life. As young parents, he and Mary took camping trips with their two children across eight western states and two provinces of Canada in a French Simca car. One family tradition was that the ice box (and one child) would spend the night in the back of the car when bears were present, as was often the case. It was later noted that the ice box was probably made of thicker steel than the Simca.

In other adventures, he and Mary took a road trip though Eastern Europe before the fall of the Iron Curtain and traveled together across Western Europe and the United Kingdom as well as Mexico, Jamaica, Australia, Haiti, New Zealand, Kenya, Togo, Burkina Faso and Niger. In his 80s and 90s, with his son, Kelly traveled to India, Japan, China, Chile, Panama, Norway, Iceland, Argentina, and The Bahamas, as well as to disaster sites like Mexico Beach and Paradise in the US.

The Bahamas trip, several months after Hurricane Durian and when he was 96, included arriving at Marsh Harbor after dark with no electricity and no taxis. He wasn’t fazed. It was what he’d expect as a seasoned reporter arriving at a disaster.

Mary and Orr Kelly were married for almost 57 years. She died in 2006. He is survived by a son, Charles John Kelly of Seattle and Chevy Chase, and a daughter, Barbara Ann Kelly of Washington, D.C.

In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the Edward Shipsey, S. J. Scholarship Fund, University of Santa Clara Communications Department: https:// mysantaclara.scu.edu/giving/cas/Communication.

A private burial was held on March 24, 2021. A public memorial Mass is planned when conditions permit. ##